Fashion

Menswear- Unseen REALITIES

Unseen REALITIES is a love letter to the late designer and fashion great, Alexander (Lee ) McQueen.

The collection began as ‘Decline’ however after watching the Mcqueen documentary I was reminded of much more important Mcqueen’s initial love affair was with fashion. And how fashion offered Mcqueen an escape from his demons.

Mcqueen commented in an interview about the fashion world,  “ I always felt like a Gazelle. And you know what happens… they get eaten.”

This personal confession inspired me to tell the story of McQueen as the Gazelle of fashion rather than the casualty.

Body-mapping-

Big Chronic Hearts

Big Chronic Hearts is a visual celebration of albino peoples, who face a crippling stigma worldwide.

I was inspired to create designs that were largely repurposed, up-cycled and reworked and could fostering a sense of celebration.

Textures were utilised from a variety of knit fabrics ( hand-knitted and machine ) as I wanted to create a strong sense of comfort for the wearer.

The shapes were also quite organic in form and mimic the human heart- an active reminder that we’re all human.

Womenswear-

Self-preservation

This mini collection was created off the concept that we treat people much like how we treat our clothes.

We throw people away, we keep them and even after we lose them we still store their memory for years to come.

Self-preservation explores the human senses and how they can be applied through clothing.

Lavender offered a great sensory option as smell is “deeply connected with the unconscious”. Luton continues to state in his essay, The Senses: Design Beyond Vision (2018) that smell is an instinctual sense that can trigger strong emotions and memories.

Smell is non-discriminatory, non-gendered and doesn’t require language in order to be enjoyed. When infused in clothing, smell can have a massive impact on people, especially those with anxiety disorders who find aromatherapy scents calming.

I then started draping plastic dress bags, as they share the parallel of looking like body bags. The use of pre-used plastic can revolutionise the fashion industry in a highly impactful and sustainable way. By using plastic as a means of clothing fabrication, it can lower landfill, Green-house gas emissions and offer a means of poetry to be heard- those who produce the most waste, wear the waste.

Touch is another sense that I hoped to evoke in the collection, with the harsh contrast of soft tulle and plastic. The choice of using tulle that has the mattered, smocked technique in the tone of skin-colour, is meant to imitate skin and links back to the recurring theme of humanity and change.

The choice of quilting lavender in random clumps also invites the need for touch, as the buds jump and wiggle in their confined squares.

Clothing speaks to a secretive part of ourselves that is terribly sentimental and complex.

Lock-down offered people a first sip of loneliness or a revisiting.

Self-preservation speaks to people on a human level and offers a means to soothe ourselves back into a busy world.